Case Studies G&A Partners Gains Valuable Insights into their Candidates with Criteria

Challenge

G&A Partners is an HR outsourcing firm that wanted to gain better insights about their job candidates. The company had been using another assessment provider, but G&A Partners felt that the assessment results weren’t providing the level of detail or insight that they were looking for in order to confidently make decisions about who to hire. According to Eleesha Martin, the Recruiting Manager at G&A, “we wanted to find a better solution.”

Solution

G&A Partners switched to Criteria and began to use Criteria’s assessments to hire for nearly every role across the company, including HR Generalists, HR Advisors, Client Advocates, Strategic HR, Accounting, Payroll, Benefits, IT, Sales, Marketing, Customer Support, and Recruiting.

To assess for these roles, G&A Partners used a varying combination of assessments in Criteria’s portfolio, including:

• Criteria Cognitive Aptitude Test (CCAT): a cognitive ability assessment that measures critical thinking, problem solving, and the ability to learn new information

• Employee Personality Profile (EPP): a general personality assessment that measures a wide range of behavioral traits associated with particular roles

• SalesAP: a personality assessment that focuses on identifying candidates that can succeed in a sales role

• Skills assessments: including assessments that measure proficiency with Microsoft Word and Excel

• Emotify: an emotional intelligence assessment, often used to assess for roles that involve emotional labor, such as management or customer service

• And a couple of custom assessments built using Criteria’s TestMaker tool.

G&A Partners also took advantage of the Team Personality component of Develop by Criteria (previously known as Talent Insights), an innovative development tool that measures, analyzes, and improves team performance. By analyzing employees' EPP results, the Team Personality feature provides valuable information about each person's work and communication styles.

Results

Better Insights for Hiring Managers

G&A Partners quickly found that the assessments enabled them to identify the best candidates early in the process. According to Eleesha Martin, “our hiring managers love it, they rely upon it.” The assessments are easy for candidates to take, the results come back immediately, and the reports are easy to read.

Hiring managers are also taking advantage of the suggested interview questions that some of the personality reports provided. They’re able to use these questions to dig deeper into how candidates might respond to various challenges on the job.

Many of the managers are also using the Team Personality component of Develop after the candidates are hired. These personality insights proved invaluable in a post-hire setting, providing managers and teams with detailed reports and analysis on their work and communication styles, as well as their strengths and areas of opportunity. Martin says that insights provided by the post-hire tool helps hiring managers “know how that person communicates, so you can communicate with them effectively.” It also helps hiring managers see where certain employees “may need some additional coaching or other areas of improvement, so they find it very valuable.”

Outstanding Assess-to-Hire Ratio

After using Criteria’s assessments for some time, G&A Partners noticed that their assess-to-hire ratio was over 50%. In other words, over half of the people that G&A assessed ended up being hired. This phenomenal result is a credit to the assessments as well as G&A’s efficient and targeted approach to recruiting.

A Seamless Integration with iCIMS

When it comes to incorporating Criteria’s assessments into their existing hiring process, G&A uses Criteria’s integration with iCIMS to seamlessly deliver the assessments. Martin says that the assessments “don’t slow down the recruiters at all.” G&A created a template that they use to send out assessment invitations, which is linked to iCIMS, and the assessments are sent “with a click of a button.”

Positive Candidate Experience

According to Martin, her goal as a Recruiting Manager is to “provide our candidates with the best experience but also provide our hiring managers with the best talent we can find.” Criteria enables G&A Partners to deliver a positive experience for candidates while also providing actionable insights for hiring managers.

For G&A Partners, candidate experience is a major focus, and they employ best practice methods for communicating with candidates. As part of the process, Martin says that “we always explain to them what to expect before we send them the assessments.” G&A’s recruiting team sends candidates the email template with clear instructions and the simple link to start the assessments. They also provide candidates with a time frame to complete the assessments, so that the recruiters can get the next interviews scheduled as soon as possible and keep the overall time-to-hire short and efficient.

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